Flow

Flow is a way to write the sections of a song once and then arrange the song in a top-down format. For instance, you may want the song to play the first verse, chorus, second verse and then repeat the chorus twice. Instead of rewriting the chorus multiple times, you can express this in a flow metatag or temporarily using the Flow field in the Playback Menu.

Expressing Flow

The first step to using flow is to create Sections and label them. You can specify a flow using a metatag in shorthand like this:

Flow: V1 C V2 C C B C C

You can also write them in a longhand form by writing out the full name of the sections in a comma-delimited list like this:

Flow: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, Chorus

OnSong creates the shorthand version by using the first character of each word in the section name. This means you do not have to use special names for this to work. In the case of a conflict, OnSong will use the first section matching the abbreviation.

Pages and Instructions

You can also use flow to add musical instruction and page breaks in the flow definition instead of in the song content. You can do this by entering flow information that does not match a section label. Because the values you may want to output may contain spaces, you will want to use the comma-delimited method. Here's an example of adding musical instruction and page breaks.

Flow: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, (Repeat 2x), ----, Bridge, Chorus, (Repeat 2x)

This will output the musical instructions (Repeat 2x) under the second and third chorus. The four hyphens will force a page break between the first set of choruses and the bridge.

Modulating Keys

You can also add certain tags in the flow to be outputted before the song is processed. In particular, you can output the transpose, key, or capo tags for mid-song key changes. For instance, we could modulate the song up a whole note after the chorus.

Flow: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, Transpose: 2, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus

Notice that we used two half steps here to make one whole step. Would could just as easily set a key explicitly like this:

Flow: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, Key: A, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus